...With Your Whole Heart

We have been looking at Joel 2 recently and considering God's solution to impending crisis in the bible. It's interesting that it tends to be the same answer everywhere you look: turn to me with your whole heart. God is longing for HIS people, on behalf of the land and the people in the city or nation, to come before Him in humility and honesty and turn from their ways. He is looking for wholeheartedness. Consider the famous 2 Chronicles 7:14 as another passage. In both of these passages, it is God himself who is bringing crisis and judgement on the land and people as a way to draw this wholeheartedness out of them. It's not surprising, then, that Jesus summed up all the law and the prophets as hanging on the necessity to "love God with your whole heart, soul, mind and strength".

You see, God doesn't really want to bring trouble and judgement on us. He is not sitting in heaven evaluating us against an eternal standard virtually impossible to reach. He has made a way for us. Jesus has already done more for us than we will ever do for him in His incartnation, life, death and resurrection. God wants relationship with the ones He loves. He wants your whole heart. Always has. Always will.

Think of the beginning of it all. Man and woman, betrothed to each other and in communion and intimate relationship with the uncreated God of Heaven. Think of how it ends. All who embraced Jesus find themselves joined once to Him as His bride and eternal relationship. God will dwell with man one more time. He wants us for Himself.

Because of His zeal for us, however, and because of our willingness to give ourselves to other loves time and again, He is willing to use judgement and crisis to get us to turn. It is biblical. And, it is relevant for today. He is calling us to turn, from our sin and to His embrace. Do not believe that Canada is immune to this. We have lived in relative safety but have grown dull in our intensity for relationship all too often. It is our sacred trust as His people to turn and embrace Him. Sanctuary exists to do this very thing and call others to it as well.

Brian
Ministry Director